PowerShell Dispose-All

December 12, 2008 — Keith Dahlby

With all the talk of Dispose safety in object model code, it’s easy to forget that those same objects need to be cleaned up in PowerShell as well. Sure, SharePoint will clean everything up when the thread ends, but my PowerShell doesn’t get closed all that often, leaving open SPRequests for extended periods of time. To combat that, I wrote a quick function that will clean up all my IDisposable variables for me:

For some reason, I don’t think it would be a good idea to Dispose() the current Runspace… (Edit: Apparently I define $Runspace in a long-forgotten part of my profile script, so don’t be worried if you don’t have that defined.)

Of course this isn’t foolproof, as variables can be overwritten and not all IDisposables will have been assigned to variables in the first place, but you could certainly adapt your shell behavior to make the most out of a catch-all cleanup like this.